Quick Reads

The Ellen Hart mysteries that I've read in the last few days are fun, escapist things for me. The first one, The Mirror and the Mask, I realized that I'd read before, but I couldn't remember what happened! The twists and turns (the second step-daughter accidently killed her mother; the step-father really *is* the biological father of the first step-daughter) pile up at the end, so they're forgettable (I remembered the exposition, not the climax).

The second mystery, which I read entirely yesterday after Jane left (I wanted to get into a different world because I was feeling sad at her departure), was partially familiar to me, but I don't think I ever finished it: The Cruel Ever After. I never get Hart's titles: even when they become a refrain in the book, they don't make good sense.

Finally, I finished a graphic novel this morning: Moving Pictures is a slight volume, but the drawings captivate me.

I should probably read it a few more times so that I get the conflict better, with more specificity. Sure, I get that it's French curators hiding paintings during the rise of Hitler, but what, exactly, is the tough decision that the protagonist, Ila, has to make?

Unfortunately, the pictures aren't complex enough for me to want to linger with them, unlike any of Bechdel's work, which rewards re-reading.

Now I have to decide which books to take on my "up north" trip: both to Bemidji for Gram's funeral and to Montreal for Zoe's performance. We'll see.

For fun

Just finished a British murder mystery: The Stately Home Murder by Catherine Aird. I just love the English syntax and allusions: so many literary references, including Shakespeare and nursery rhymes. I only got a few.

Reading Around

I finished the young adult novel Rage tonight: the voice is compelling (first-person, present-tense narrator), and the scenarios remind me that high school can be SO awful for so many people.

Also, I've been reading around in a food book I found fallen behind my cookbooks: Eat More, Weigh Less insists on a low-fat diet, which is fine, although Pollan would argue with Ornish's focus on nutrients. The book also has recipes, and many look good to me.

I love TED talks: Ornish's updated findings are interesting.

Latest Reads

This morning, I finished Hunting the Witch, a murder-mystery by local author Ellen Hart. I've read a bunch that include her regular sleuth, Jane Lawless, although I have to admit that I don't really remember all the titles. But I like the familiar landscape (Jane owns a restaurant in Linden Hills) and the romantic problems: yep, this series is my "trash reading"!

My thoughtful reading this week has been Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food. I turned down corners of may pages, wanting to use them in class next year. I heard him speak at the Edina Barnes & Noble, maybe about 5 years ago, with Zoe. He might have been talking about this book!

Worth Reading

Up at Jane's, I finished Wicked and left if for Jane and Kelsie (who promptly photographed the book and posted it to facebook!). The story's definitely imaginative and delightful, although the ending is weak and anticlimactic.

On Jane's deck, I also began (again) Leopold's A Sand County Almanac. I'll keep working through that as I continue my book-a-week (at least) project.

Because it doesn't seem as though I can read one book at a time, I'm also taking bites out of another antique book I found, probably with Lisa last year: Catholicism and the American Mind was published in 1928. Interestingly, what I've read so far (that we Americans should accept those mysterious Catholics in our midst) could be applied to Muslims today.

Short and Sweet

I know that I said I wanted plot, but instead I read through a slender 1940s volume called And the Greeks. Its subtitle is A Book of Hellenic Recipes and Culinary Lore Collected, Edited and Arranged by Allan Ross MacDougall, author of The Gourmet's Almanac.


MacDougall was a friend of Edna St. Vincent Millay (her biographer and letters editor), Isadora Duncan (her manager, correspondent, and biographer), Kay Boyle (correspondent), Djuna Barnes (correspondent), William Carlos Williams: lots of the folks I studied for my MA thesis. It seems as though he was an activist for women's suffrage in England: he must be the student mentioned here in a 1912 news article.


Here's a blurb about MacDougall from the New York Public Library's dance collection:


Allan Ross Macdougall, an American writer born in 1893 [and died in 1956--took me a while to find that date!], lived and worked in Paris in the 1920's His subjects were wide in range, from the performing arts to the decorative arts for the periodical Arts and Decoration, and sometimes perfume and make-up for the magazines Charm and Beauty. A member of Isadora Duncan's circle, he wrote an essay entitled “Isadora: an essay in the biography of an American dancer” which was eventually published in 1960 as Isadora; a revolutionary in art and love. With Irma Duncan, he co-wrote a partial biography of Isadora Duncan entitled Isadora Duncan's life in Soviet Russia and her last years, published in 1929.

Reading

On Monday, I finished T.C. Boyle's When the Killing's Done: don't think I'll read another by him. The story was fairly interesting for the first half, but it ended like a bad murder-mystery with an escaped rattlesnake (one of ten that had been in burlap bags on a boat that got crashed by a giant ship) peeking at humans celebrating their eradication of wild pigs from a California island. Yeah, irony.

Boyle's prose is excessively detailed, calling attention to his ability to notice details, like exactly how many ounces of vodka in drunken mother's glass. And most of his characters were women, imperfectly realized, who vacillated between the female stereotype (worried about make-up and hair) and the male stereotype (competitive to a fault).

Next, I began a series of short stories that Ricardo left for me (at least I think that's where I got the book): Say You're One of Them is set in awful Africa, and I couldn't stand the first story about a 12-year-old prostitute supporting her family, told from her little eight-year-old brother's point-of-view. I also tried the last story, again a child protagonist, who witnesses her Tutsi mother's murder by her Hutu father. The brutality is supposed to be humanized by the child protagonists, but for me the stories just reinforce the *lack* of humanity that people attribute to Africans. I think it supports racism, and I don't know why Oprah picked it for one of her book club offerings.

So after that, I began again the Mark Doty memoir Firebird. I've tried it before--I love his poetry--but again, the narrative point-of-view bothers me: the excessive detail that doesn't add up to anything but an awareness of the narrator's powers of cataloging observation. But I dipped around in it, reading beginnings and middles of chapters, finishing the ending because I wasn't sure I'd be able to read the chapters chronologically.

I've gotta find a novel, I guess, that'll pull me along. Faulkner awaits, as does Sinclair's The Jungle. I know Toni Morrison has a new novel, Home, and I don't think I've read her last one, A Mercy, on sabbatical when I was reading all of Morrison. So I guess I'll get started on one of them or go to the library.

It's summertime!

Book A Week

Since my "summer vacation" started this week, I figure I should have some kind of project. I decided to read at least a book a week: easy! This week, I've read Lives of the Monster Dogs, a Half-Price Books purchase I made last December because I thought Lisa might like it. I finished it at her house on Thursday.

Today, I picked up a book that a Metro State student left me last year! I'd forgotten that a student, a woman I think, proposed that we read T.C. Boyle in American lit. S/he left me the book When the Killing's Done: not a title I'd usually pick up. One of the reasons I'm not interested in the whole Hunger Games phenomenon: to me, children killing children is not entertainment.

So the books are going to be those that are around me that I should have read all the way through (The Jungle, A Sand County Almanac) and those I've bought or been given and haven't yet read (they're all over my house).

Stay tuned: I'll post finished titles to the right.

"Academically Adrift"

A couple of days ago in The New York Times, op-ed columnist Bob Herbert published "College the Easy Way." In it, he reflects on a new book called Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum and Josipa Roska. 

It was published in January, and it got a bunch of press then. In fact, I've heard these authors on the radio, and I'm sympathetic to their findings -- I, too, find that the institution I work for has struggled to preserve its integrity (often, in my view, sacrificing that integrity in order to satisfy legislative overseers who have none). 


I am not sympathetic, however, to the blaming of faculty: teachers are such easy targets, aren't they? Public conversation about teachers is almost always negative, a fact pointed out by Nicholas Kristof in this column, where he argues that teachers should be paid more, not less). It's tougher to look at systems -- and to see the forces behind the breakdown of systems.

Related to that point about the forces behind the breakdown, I read a comment at the end of Herbert's column, which ends with almost 200 comments from readers around the world. The following comment sums up what I have been thinking about the political consequences of the bully-Republican politics we are living under. I've printed it below [adding paragraph breaks] to share a straightforward articulation of the problem:

Dr. Sam

California

March 5th, 2011

1:40 am

It would seem from what we know now that rightwing Republicans want to set our kids "academically adrift." They know that an educated electorate would not buy into their conspiracy theories, their parochial view of the world and their narrow, inhumane vision of human relationship. 

Therefore, they have gone about rewriting school and college texts in such places as Texas and Mississippi to accommodate their bogus religious and political propaganda such as creationism, civil war heroes and a fictional interpretation of the pre-civil rights era. 

In their deficit-cutting frenzy, they have set their eyes on dismantling public education as we know[it], shifting money from public schools to private schools through a voucher program that benefits even the children of the rich. 

At the federal and state levels, they are proposing deep cuts in education even though America is clearly lagging behind in this important area compared to others nations like China and many parts of Asia, and even though we are now faced with global competition in a knowledge-based economy. 

Think of how ignorant our kids and the broad electorates in America are becoming as they listen to the misinformation and untruths that poor our in deluge in rightwing media daily. 

Finally, while they claim they are for small government, they interfere boldly with many aspects of our private lives, including the bed rooms of the nation. We are truly in trouble! God save us from Republican fundamentalism. 

Additions

So I thought I'd already ordered my books for next semester -- through the college bookstore's website, which is multi-layered, multi-stepped, multi-confusing.

A few days ago, I decided to add another book to my Engl 90 course, a terrific textbook called Considering Literacy by my most-excellent colleague Linda Adler-Kassner. I haven't read the entire text, but it seems perfectly suited for the course, which is supposed to help students develop college-level writing skills.

As I logged into our bookstore site, I found out that my previous order had never been processed: I don't know where the information went. I don't know why my previously ordered books did not appear. I don't know why.

Maybe I need to develop some "literacy" skills myself when it comes to reading/navigating websites, especially those designed without any consideration of users!

Lovely reading

Friday night's event was terrific: great selection of poets and prose writers. Cullen's the best reader: serious, slow, respectful of the poem and of her listeners. Other writers read well, too -- one poet in particular who acted out her poem, but not in a cheesy way (a remarkable feat, actually). Only a couple folks seemed to zip or stumble through. Most writers were from MN and IA -- don't know if that's true for all of the contributors. Makes you realize we have *really good* writers in our neck-of-the-woods. One thing I noted, though: I'd forgotten how important it is to wear black to such events!

The gathering afterward in the auditorium lobby was a bit awkward: cramped space, food difficult to eat without sitting down (and the meatballs were terrible - like dog food!). Even in such straits, however, a nice red wine (even if its in a plastic "glass") can make an evening an occasion.

Loss. Prevention.

This morning is the funeral for a Century student, Jeremy Caulkins, who took his own life last week. His brother Chris is on our faculty and has been working on raising campus awareness about depression, the apparent cause of his brother's death (and the cause of Chris's wife's suicide some years ago).

Yesterday afternoon, I listened to the amazing writer Kate Bornstein talk about many things, among them her six close-calls with suicide: she planned it down to "a T six times," she said, but she never attempted it. She always found something to stop her, and she wrote a book about those alternatives, a radical-truth-telling book I immediately bought: Hello, Cruel World: 101 Alternatives to Suicide for Teens, Freaks, and Other Outlaws.

I'm going to recommend that our library order this book. Perhaps books truly are medicine.

What's old is new

I found myself in an online article from the Wall Street Journal called "When Lit-Crit Mattered."

I'm not usually a reader of the WSJ, but this link was provided by "Arts & Letters Daily," a helpful, informative online "service of The Chronicle of Higher Education."

The article reviews the book Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism, a collection of essays about New Criticism edited by Garrick Davis.

Reading the summary of New Critics' commitments and practices confirmed for me what I've always suspected but didn't quite know: I was trained in New Criticism. I've been a close reader of texts for most of my life, and those skills were honed by literature professors at St. Kate's and Penn State. At the U of M's rhetoric department, close reading became "discourse analysis" as a research method. I was also encouraged to read *everything* using such a method, including non-canonical authors thanks to my professors who practiced if didn't overtly teach feminist and critical theory. So my education didn't suffer from the narrowness-of-canon that New Critics are accused of perpetuating.

Because my grad school experiences were interrupted by child-raising, I missed the intense training in things like the cultural-studies-type of literary theory, structuralism, or deconstruction. Therefore, my classroom activities center around the ways-of-reading I found most effective. I've taught my own students critical reading practices that foreground the text even though students most often want to foreground the authors' lives as a way to understand the text. I've never encouraged that because it seems to take all the power out of an imaginative work, and the human imagination is what we praise in literature, if you ask me, not the life led by the author.

Another book for me to read in my spare time.

Not-so-Good book, Good book

Narrative voice always charms me: in the beginning of The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears, the narrator beguiles with simple exposition, seemingly profound in his observations because of their easy clarity. But the novel doesn't ascend from that point; instead, the story slows to a watery ending, thin as broth. Disappointing, but it's just a first novel by Dinaw Mengestu.

On the other hand, The Yiddish Policemen's Union charms AND sustains that charm with its thick stew of dialect-smeared complexity. An entire layered world created out of whole cloth, it's a testament to the mature imagination of its author, Michael Chabon.

A New Resource

I was online ordering an examination copy of Graff and Birkenstein's They Say/I Say, and on the Norton Website I found a GREAT companion site: Norton/Write. The exercises are especially good and include immediate feedback/scoring.

Give some of them a try!

"Finished in Two Sittings"

That's what Melissa Dahl, MSNBC.com's intern, said. I, too, finished Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows in that same time-span. I liked it - as I have the other six books - because of the rolicking, detailed emotional ride Rowling sets out before her reader. She understands hooks of all kinds: emotional, visual, chronological, literal. A good read, but I wouldn't want to teach it!